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Overview

Listal is a very early beta product that allows you to catalog, tag and share your physical media. At this point it is free.

While functionality is currently limited (heck, it’s only a few days old), the site clearly anticipates upcoming features and it looks like it can become quite useful. Since there are limited solutions for organizing physical media using your computer, I like where this is going.

Once you’ve registered, you can tell it the books, music, movies and games (physical media) you own. There is also a nice ajax interface to tag items and rate them. Your listal stuff is public – ours is at techcrunch.listal.com. For now, there is no way to make any part of the list private.

Features

Features include:

Add products via search, amazon ASIN number or ISBN (for books)

Group items with custom themed lists

Tag items

Rate Items

Add Wanted Items

Write and read reviews of items

Delicious Monster

I also want to mention a wonderful and similar product called Delicious Monster (Mac-only and not browser-based, you have to download software). In addition to an award winning design, DM also allows users to simply point a digital video camera at any bar code and capture the media information without typing a single thing in.

I’d love to one-day read about what happened to Jotspot at Google as not only did it take an age to come to be, what finally emerged on the other side was a shadow of its former itself. Google’s simplicity doctrine culled all the cool stuff and what was the industry-leading wiki platform became wiki-for-dummies. In which case, why bother acquiring in the first place as surely it would have made sense to just have built that from scratch on the Google platform. I mean, c’mon, a business Wiki platform without page-level permissions!

The payoff for them might be more startups that are easier for them to acquire and the reward for startups is that the ability to scale, quickly and easily, is built into your app from day one.

Of course it might have the opposite effect, by making those startups that use Google App Engine only valuable to Google and not other potential investors – but that’s probably not going to be much of a hassle if Google App Engine is really rolled out as they have said it will be.

Cheers,
Angus

Markus

Excellent article and great points Nik.

I wonder if the “mortality rate” for apps acquired by Google hurts their chances for potential future acquisitions?

Nag

Nick,
Good Article.
But for GrandCentral..

I am still using grandcentral and i still get my calls and the service is still working fine for me. So my calls are still coming.

Thanks to TC for letting me know about GrandCentral…

Hurray to Mike..
Cheers, Nag

http://www.michaelsheehan.com Michael Sheehan

And Jaiku for heavens sake! What are they doing with that!

http://www.bandb.blogspot.com/ Richard Taylor

While It is true that Google acquisitions do seem to get derailed, I do not think the problem is technology. Firstly, the Google technology Stack is like it is for a very good reason, it is scalable beyond belief. Also, it is worth noting that all of the Google technology stack is available through Open Source projects like Hadoop and Hypertable. Any forward looking company should be looking to adopt the new scalable technology stack, or they risk being overwhelmed by success such as Twitter has.

http://me2day.net/ironyjk/2008/07/17#18:38:15 ironyjk's me2DAY

iron의 생각…

They spend years building on a technology stack that nobody else is using….

http://www.theequitykicker.com/2008/07/17/google-is-closed-at-the-core-making-acquisitions-tough-to-integrate/ Google is closed at the core - making acquisitions tough to integrate | The Equity Kicker

[…] this article on TechCrunchIT Nik Cubrilovic gives more detail on the acquistions that haven’t gone so well […]

Andy

I was about to use JotSpot with clients prior to its purchase. And now without a documentated XMl API (you do appear to add format=xml for urls or something similar), it has dropped off the map as a true business ready platform.

I agree with #6 that it isn’t all technology. We are perhaps asking for too much too quickly in these days of cloud computing, online collaboration and rich internet apps. But I hope the pace does get quicker.

http://michaelkpate.com/ Michael Pate

On the Gillmor Gang the other day, Steve asked some Google product managers about the possibility of Google launching a Twitter clone. They were apparently completely unaware that Google already owns Jaiku. But then, everyone at Google seems unaware of the fact at this point.

I agree with Richard Taylor insofar as that I don’t believe that technology is the reason. I think we may have finally found something that Google is not so good at and that is integrating acquired companies. Integrating technology is no excuse for a service to stop exepting new users/customers. Actually, if you plan on stopping acquiring customers once an acquisition has taken place, you might as well not buy the company at all.

Imagine this M&A pitch to the CEO: “So, we buy these guys for $45million, The first thing we do is stop accepting new users. Then we fiddle around for 18 months. Then, should users still care and no competitor have overtaken us, we will re-launch. By then, we will have killed all momentum. And all the enthusiatic people inside the company have left. And all our evangelists have grown bored with us. But it really is a great deal!!”

Which CEO wold give the green light to that?

http://www.thisweekinlondon.co.uk Paul Parkinson

Good article but one thing springs to mind. Given this reliance on a “proprietary” infrastructure (I know it’s not truly prop but bear with me) is this a weakness in Google’s armoury? We can all think of dozens of companies who have gone down the prop route and come to a sticky ugle bloody mess. I’m not suggesting for one minute that it’ll happen to Google anytime soon but if it did….

[…] obvious example of promising startup acquired by Google that has languished. But as TechCrunchIT points out there are others and, more specifically, often a long delay between the time of a company’s […]

Ronald Hobbs

The tech might still be proprietary, but google have been pretty open with the concepts and the research behind mapreduce and bigtable. the biggest problems developers have, isn’t switching tech. ask any Java dev that’s had to work on python or c# or vice versa.

What kills you is the shift in thinking. that’s what takes time, changing from c to java took years for companies to get right. And vb to c#/.net for MS houses. Lisp to anything, etc.

Bigtable and mapreduce are shifts in approaches, and by google opening up their research and explaining things you’ve got other implementations (For mapreduce you’ve got Hadoop by apache, for bigtable you’ve got hbase & simpledb) that’ll allow a dev to get up to speed with the thinking and then it’s a simply “getting to know the libraries” experience.

[…] DodgeBall is the most obvious example of one that has seemed to languish. But as TechCrunchIT points out there are others and, more specifically, often a long delay between the time of a company’s […]

[…] Nik Cubrilovic had reported this and he gave pretty justified reasons as to why this happens to whatever firm Google Acquires. The major thing here is the issue involved at what Google has used to build its empire upon; MapReduce and BigTable both of which are very rarely used by developers in the developer community. The number ranges in a few thousand while other developers, for platforms like .Net Win32 API, Apache, PHP etc are in millions. The result more and more applications can be easily integrated and implemented upon companies running themselves on these technologies. […]

[…] Cubrilovic explains that something akin to the above, does actually happen to companies acquired by […]

http://www.jasonkolb.com Jason Kolb

GrandCentral is working great for me, I honestly wouldn’t want them to change much. Love it.

It’s only natural that being absorbed into a big company will slow down a startup. This happened when the company I sold to Cisco got absorbed, and it really pissed me off at first. But the upside is that the product will go through a much more rigorous process for the next release, so you can count on it being infinitely more tested, documented, and defined. Not sure if it’s such a good thing FOREVER, but most startups need to go through this process at some point in order to get up to “globally scalable” status.

I liked Jaiku much more then Twitter, but after Google acquisition they have just disappeared. No more blog posts abut them, no one from my friends joined Jaiku and now I have to use Twitter just like everybody else.. :(

http://arhitektonas.blogspot.com George Petsagourakis

Basically, they have done the same thing with SketchUp, a 3d modeler. This tool is used by many many professionals. It is a wonderfull tool and Google has never released any version. Last version was released before they acquired @Last (the creator company). Ok they gave a version out,… but basically they didn’t add anything to it. They just made sure that the program name read “Google SketchUp” after that ,… there is this huge,… 1 1/2 yr silence…

Many ppl are getting very aggitated!

http://gonze.com Lucas Gonze

Once an acquisition is complete the arriving group has to compete with internal projects for resources, and this means establishing a political base within the company. Google is famous for tough politics, so I imagine that one big problem with acquisitions is how long it takes to make the politics work.